SupeRSquad

While aerial drones are everywhere, they are limited to making contributions at a distance. The SupeRSquad (Supervised Robotic Squadron) mission envisions a world where aerial drones, either independently or teamed with ground-based robots, are trusted to autonomously fly with enough positional precision to make contact with assets. And do so in environments deprived of GPS.

Imagine you could trust a drone to autonomously:

• Fly in an aircraft hangar and land on an engine to deploy a small robotic crawler to perform an in-situ inspection
• Ascend a wind turbine and make contact inspection with a blade after a lightning strike
• Deploy an array of sensors across assets at a power plant

Key demonstrations:

• May: Autonomous flight using motion capture IR camera localization system. This system works by illuminating the area with Infra-Red (IR) light, detecting the location of the retroreflectors located on the drone, and tracking it through the space
• August: "Trusted Autonomy" demonstrated by having a safety co-processor monitoring the location of a drone while in flight to ensure it stays within safe parameters. If the drone goes out of a keep out area of the room, the system takes over from the pilot (either autopilot or human) and forces the drone to land
• October: Flight demonstration with Virtual Reality “puck”, maintaining same autonomy and fidelity at a fraction of the cost. This uses COTS hardware made low cost by the gaming community for VR, to enable something entirely different: drone flight in physical reality
• February 2019: Demonstration of UAV-UGV teaming to perform a coordinated flight and motion in a GPS-Denied environment. With the position information provided by the UGV’s localization system, the UAV was commanded to navigate along a set of pre-planned waypoints, before landing on the initial take-off location (see video below).